Leading Design in remote and distributed teams - Rob Boynes - Medium

Lots of good, practical advice in this article. The conclusions nailed it though. Remote working is as much about inclusivity as it is about flexibility.

If you have a family you care for, elderly parents, children, a non-affluent family history, or are a minority for whom opportunity is less accessible — which let’s face it is a lot of people — you can’t just up and leave to New York, London or San Francisco to throw down $3K on an apartment rental. And why should that sacrifice — or attainment — be the defining factor in your career success? Is it because the role you are qualified for, for whatever reason, requires you to be present in an expensive city, despite the fact that it — if we are all really honest — could be done from anywhere?

Smashing Podcast With Amy Hupe

Amy goes into depth on the GDS design system work she did. So much good stuff in here. What I particularly like is the continued reference to user research and how it directly affects the roadmap for the system. Not suprising in GDS, but non-the-less refreshing.

And that’s for them it’s just about getting that evidence-based backing for the decision that they’re trying to kind of push through. But then there’s other people who really care about understanding the research and whether it’s appropriate for their context and what additional research they might need to fill in to fill any gaps that have been missed or perhaps that they are dealing with in their unique situation. So I think the approach was to try and understand all of those different needs and to try and get a sense of priority amongst those and understand like how we could cater to all of the various different requirements that people had from the documentation. It’s not just one kind of one thing that fits everybody.

Frank Chimero · Redesign: Perfecta Trifecta

This is an excellent read from Frank on his considerations for type choice on his new website design. What I like about it is the mixture of rational, functional decision making mixed with the less rational, emotional, vague points...

something Caslon-ish, Georgia-y, or Times-esque. Even though these are different classifications of serif typefaces, they hold together as a list, because I’m looking for the quotidian here—something “normal” without much of an evident hand in the design.

Fast · Patrick Collison

Some fascinating examples of things done quickly. The example of Git caught my eye:

Git. Linus Torvalds started working on Git on April 3 2005. It was self-hosting 4 days later. On April 20 2005, 17 days after work commenced, Linux 2.6.12-rc3 was publicly released with Git.

Frank

Frank's new Frank website is beautiful. Subtle animations and transitions elevate the classic layout. Lovely.

What is a research framework and why do we need one?

BBC Sound Effects

The BBC release 16,000 sound effects free for non-commercial use in WAV format. I mean, that's amazing, but what I did notice was the great meta data. For example:

Two false starts, constant run, stop. (2 1/4 h.p. 4-stroke)

Paper Sizes

International paper sizes in a rather fetching website. Unfortunately the aesthetic is somewhat marred by the Carbon ad unit.